XRP Ticks Up on Gate's RLUSD Pair Launch as Ripple Pursues $1 Billion Revenue Goal Without Token Dependence

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse aims for $1B revenue by 2026 from services, excluding XRP holdings. A new Gate.io XRP/RLUSD pair briefly lifted XRP to $1.24, but the token remains 66% below its 52-week high.

XRP’s price edged higher this week, but the token’s micro-gains are playing out against a broader strategic shift at Ripple that is deliberately uncoupling the company’s financial fortunes from its native cryptocurrency. While a new trading pair on Gate provided a short-term catalyst, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has set a revenue target that explicitly excludes the firm’s massive XRP holdings.

Garlinghouse aims for $1 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2026, generated entirely from services such as payment processing, stablecoin issuance and crypto custody. The figure does not reflect the value of Ripple’s XRP treasury, a move that signals a clear divide between the company’s operational performance and the token’s market trajectory.

That separation was underscored this week when Gate introduced a direct XRP/RLUSD trading pair on June 15 at 09:00 UTC. The pair allows traders to move between XRP and Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin without routing through USDT, USDC or Bitcoin – a gap the exchange previously lacked. Gate launched RLUSD with four pairs simultaneously: BTC/RLUSD, ETH/RLUSD, XRP/RLUSD and RLUSD/USDT, sweetening the debut with a 750,000 RLUSD incentive programme spread across trading, liquidity and user campaigns. Stablecoin-to-stablecoin transactions were excluded from the rewards to avoid distorting organic market data.

RLUSD, which Ripple reported had a market capitalisation of $1.7 billion earlier this month, is already listed on Binance, Bitstamp, Kraken, Gemini, ByBit and other major platforms. Gate expands that reach, and notably listed the stablecoin on both Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, giving the pair a deeper infrastructure connection. Data provider CCData already includes XRP-RLUSD as a recognised pair on Bitstamp and Bullish in its XRP price index, meaning Gate is building on existing market structure rather than creating it from scratch.

The listing helped push XRP to $1.24, a 4.6% daily gain, with nearly 3.4 percentage points of that advance occurring within seven hours on short covering, ETF-related demand and inflows from Asian exchanges. Yet the longer-term picture remains sobering. The token sits 66% below its 52-week high of $3.65 and has lost roughly 34% of its value since the start of the year.

Ripple is simultaneously rolling out technical initiatives that could alter how developers interact with its ledger. In June the company released a new developer kit targeting artificial-intelligence applications on the XRP Ledger, allowing automated payments that settle in three to five seconds using either XRP or RLUSD. Management has not disclosed whether these tools are expected to generate meaningful revenue, but the offering reinforces Ripple’s push to build infrastructure that does not rely solely on its token.

The company’s growth is increasingly driven outside the United States, where the lack of clear crypto regulation has not hindered international expansion. For investors, the message is becoming clearer: Ripple is positioning itself as a traditional financial-infrastructure provider, and a strong operational performance no longer guarantees rising demand for XRP. As long as new solutions do not require the token, the price action will remain decoupled from the business results.

Whether the Gate pair develops genuine depth after the initial incentives expire will be the real test for XRP’s liquidity channel. If it succeeds, the token gains a durable link to Ripple’s own stablecoin ecosystem. If it stalls, the disconnect between corporate milestones and market price will only widen.